Recession? Business is booming for virtual friendship

Michael Simkins

• Last Updated: February 09. 2009 9:30AM UAE / February 9. 2009 5:30AM GMT

The actor Orson Welles, who was never short of friends – unless he was trying to attract investors for one of his movies – once observed that we are born alone and we die alone. “Only through love and friendship can we create the illusion that for the moment we are not.”

Well, my new best friend would beg to differ. My new best friend is never alone. He makes sure of it. He would point to the bonds between himself and me as a living illustration that comradeship can conquer all.

Who is he? Ah, that’s the one question I can’t answer. We’ve never met. But I know he’s my new best friend because he’s been telling me so every week since Christmas.

Taka123 is the latest of a long list of individuals who e-mail me regularly to invite me to join their social networking group on the internet. They’re an eclectic mixture of the good, the bad and the ugly, ranging from women in never-heard-of cities in Russia who want to show me “some pictures”, right through to past acquaintances who wish to catch up and reignite our friendship and whom, if I saw in public, I would probably cross the street to avoid. Their only common theme is their desire for me to become their “friend”. Some of them even spell my name correctly.

Taka123 is something else though. Although he variously addresses me as Simon, Simmom and Simeon, (my name is Michael) he assures me that I’m so special he wants me to become a Zorpian.

I always thought Zorpians were the sort of creatures that Captain Kirk and his mates battled with during episodes of Star Trek; stiff-legged beings sprayed silver and advancing down corridors with their arms outstretched and wearing vegetable colanders on their heads.

But Zorpia, far from a planet in some distant galaxy, is “the largest social network you’ve never heard of”. In other words, it’s yet another player in the burgeoning global market of virtual friendship. Recession may be hitting the real world, but in the world of cyberbuddies, business is booming.

The statistics are giddying. Facebook, for instance, has over 60 million active users, with 250,000 new applications per day, mainly due to something called the widget platform, which sounds to me like the sort of spacecraft you’d use to get to planet Zorpia. MySpace is even more virulent: recently there were over 4.5 million hits in a single 24-hour period. That’s a heck of a lot of people with time on their hands.

Once the bastion of bored teenagers, the fastest growing demographic in this global phenomenon is now those aged 25 and older. One up and coming TV casting executive who cornered me at a party recently spent virtually the entire evening regaling me about virtually what fun it all was, cataloguing his 300 “buddies” and their nightly chitchat (favourite restaurants, holiday snaps and celebrity gossip). But when I asked him the names of his neighbours in his apartment block in Manhattan he looked at me like I was from the planet Zorp.

Quite apart from the ramifications to world productivity of all this footling activity – 3 million minutes are spent each day on Facebook alone – research suggests that making free with one’s personal life is potentially hazardous to one’s wealth and welfare. Only this week in London a pub was closed down by the police after teenagers posted photographs of illegal drinking sessions on the website Bebo. And experts agree that posting details to all and sundry of imminent holiday departure dates, snaps of the inside of one’s house, anticipated working hours, and in some cases even bank details, is tantamount to inviting your virtual pals to make a very real trip to your property or savings account while you’re looking the other way.

According to statistics just published, up to 10 per cent of all crime including fraud and burglary is committed not by criminal gangs sitting in parked cars or at banks of computers, but by friends and people already known to you who’ve just kept their eyes and ears open.

But perhaps I’m just getting old. After all, Taka123 looks harmless enough. Indeed, his digital mugshot that came with today’s correspondence suggests a man who looks about as threatening as my local newsagent.

In fact he might even be my local newsagent – in which case I might just do something daring and pop up the road to speak to him in person. In any case, were I to enter Zorpia with him, Taka123 and I might find that comparing favourite recipes and photographs of our pet goldfish each night might be the missing piece in our hitherto vacuous lives. But perhaps not.

Jean Paul Sartre, the French philosopher, famously wrote, “Hell is other people”. He’d obviously spent too much time among the Zorpians.

Michael Simkins is a London-based actor and author